How VAF works in a tax advisory firm
VAF does the groundwork on receipts, bank reconciliation and client queries, while review, sign-off and filing stay with your team.
This example shows how a tax advisory firm of three to thirty people could work with VAF. It describes typical routines, not a particular firm. VAF prepares, staff check and approve, and the tax adviser stays responsible for whatever leaves the firm.
The starting point
Tax clerks do the bookkeeping and payroll and prepare advance VAT returns, tax returns and annual accounts, all against fixed deadlines. Payroll tax returns and advance VAT returns, for instance, are due on the tenth of a month.
Staff are hard to find. According to STAX 2024, a survey for the German Federal Chamber of Tax Advisers (BStBK), 32 percent of sole practices and 75.7 percent of professional practice companies had tax clerk vacancies in the two years before. Only 23.2 percent of hiring firms filled every opening, down from more than half last time.
VAF takes on the groundwork, not the advice, and replaces no one.
What VAF prepares
In its FAQ on AI, the BStBK itself names tasks such as recognising receipts, drafting emails and summarising administrative guidance. In this example, VAF handles five of them.
- VAF reads new receipts from the incoming folder and lists each with its client, period and document type, flagging possible duplicates and invoices missing details the firm's rules require.
- For bank reconciliation, VAF reads the transactions from a CSV export and lists payments without a receipt.
- From that list, VAF drafts emails asking clients for missing receipts or about unclear payments.
- VAF lists the deadlines in assessments and letters from the folder, with date and page reference, and proposes when each objection period ends.
- VAF summarises chamber circulars, association updates and Finance Ministry letters from the folder, citing the source.
Coding entries to accounts stays with your team and practice software, which VAF is not connected to. Lists from it, such as bank transactions, come as CSV files in a folder on VAF's machine, since VAF reads Excel sheets only up to row 50 but CSV files in full. Emailed receipts and assessments go into that folder first, because VAF does not read mail attachments. Paper is scanned and read with text recognition.
How the team signs off
Here VAF works on a schedule, reading new documents in the incoming folder every morning and reconciling bank transactions weekly. Each member of staff has their own account and can also give VAF tasks in the chat. Results wait in VAF's web interface.
Someone checks every list against the originals, and a deadline only goes into the deadline register once its date is confirmed in the assessment. One misread date moves the deadline.
Emails to clients stay drafts until a member of staff has approved them. Longer letters, such as a request for documents missing for the annual accounts, are drafted as Word files. VAF follows your template's structure but writes a new file, so your team moves the text into its own letterhead and layout.
The BStBK's FAQ says the tax adviser must do the final check of AI output, since AI can sound right and still be wrong.
What stays with people
Some tasks are deliberately kept away from VAF in this setup.
- VAF files and approves nothing, whether tax returns, advance VAT returns or social security statements.
- VAF does not advise clients. Binding tax advice comes from the firm's certified advisers.
- VAF signs nothing, issues no certificates and lodges no objections.
- VAF's deadline list is a second check alongside the deadline register that Federal Fiscal Court case law expects firms to keep, not a replacement.
- Whether a process meets the GoBD, Germany's rules for proper digital bookkeeping, depends on the firm's procedures, not on any one program, VAF included.
Why run it locally
Tax advisers are bound by professional secrecy, and unauthorised disclosure of client secrets is a crime under section 203 of the German Criminal Code. Section 62a of the Tax Advisory Act requires, among other things, that outside providers, IT and AI included, be chosen carefully and bound to confidentiality in a text-form contract before seeing client data.
The BStBK's FAQ states that, as a rule, client-related data may not go into publicly available AI services without the client's consent. A locally installed system under the firm's control may offer more data protection, it adds, while a cloud service takes over updates and maintenance.
With a local model, VAF can run entirely on a machine in the firm. Prompts, files and memory stay on its network and no model provider sees the requests, so fewer parties are involved. An IT provider maintaining the machine may still have access, and the firm decides whether a use is permissible.
If a firm tells the Blueprint it handles data under professional secrecy, the plan therefore recommends a model on its own machine. If the hardware falls short, an API model is an option, but prompts and content then go to that provider, an outside service provider like any other.
In the Blueprint you can plan, with no obligation, which of these tasks suit your firm, where VAF gets its data and what your team approves.